BIOS Flashing - Lessons Learned

[Wonderwrench]

Nice post.

This is a good question,

Question: Had I saved my CMOS to HDD (or flash) the first time around, would have have saved me from having to reset all the settings manually?  If so, that'd be an important edit for this thread!

Is there a way to save preset saved BIOS settings, like your OC settings?

Or is it best to just re-do them when flashing BIOS?

I have a template made, for safety sake.

You can use F11 and F12 to save or load up to 6(?) sets of BIOS settings.  These on-chip profiles are wiped out when you flash, so they're really only good for tweaking it seems.  But, while you're in there, there's an option to write them to HDD.  That would seem to be a very smart thing to do!  I'll find out with the next rev whether I can use that to restore all the settings.

Still, nothing beats having a digital camera handy to record all the settings right before you flash.  Remember what a pain that used to be, using pen and paper???

I would be very leery of saving the bios settings to a harddrive. I did some research on this and it looks like the data is saved in the small unpartitioned space at the end of the drive. If this is the case big problems may result. Especially if using a SSD as the board may be dumb enough to try to write to the spare area. Unless proved otherwise I'd stay far far away.

Bill 

[KEP]

I would be very leery of saving the bios settings to a harddrive. I did some research on this and it looks like the data is saved in the small unpartitioned space at the end of the drive. If this is the case big problems may result. Especially if using a SSD as the board may be dumb enough to try to write to the spare area. Unless proved otherwise I'd stay far far away.

Hmmmm, I could've swore I saw a an option to save it to a specific file.  Yeah, just checked, and there's a file called "SAVEDBIO" on the flash drive I had the BIOS update on.